"How manifold are your works, O Lord! The earth is full of your creatures!" This is our Pentecost song.

As we pray Psalm 104, we celebrate all of creation as a revelation of God's very being. In "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home," Pope Francis tells us, "From the beginning of the world ... the mystery of Christ is at work ... in the natural world as a whole." 

Recently, we've seen some concrete signs of our growing awareness of God's universal and inclusive presence. During Lent, NCR published an explanation that the seeming antisemitism found in the Gospel of John and other New Testament passages cannot justify rejection or the demeaning of the Jewish people at any time in history.

On March 30, the Vatican repudiated what has been called the "Doctrine of Discovery," papal pronouncements used to justify the expropriation of Indigenous lands and policies of forced assimilation of different ethnic groups into a majority culture. We are making some progress in finding God in all things.

Nevertheless, as Pope Francis warns us in Fratelli Tutti, new technologies have proven incapable of eliminating the dread we imagine beyond our walls. He lamented our tendency to fall victim to ancient fears of cultures different from our own. 

To wit, on April 10, The New York Times reported on proposed bills in Florida that would make it a felony to shelter, hire or transport undocumented immigrants and would require hospitals to report the immigration status of their patients. This seems like what Francis calls fear of people "from whom we must defend ourselves at all costs." 

In what sounds like a direct warning to our country, Francis says in Fratelli Tutti, "Those who raise walls will end up as slaves within the very walls they have built. They are left without horizons, for they lack this interchange with others."

Today, we celebrate Pentecost, the feast of God's Spirit filling the earth with all her creatures and cultures. To what does this feast invite us? 

Beginning with the Gospel of John, we can see the progression of the early church's reflection on the Spirit's effects on the Christian community. 

John begins by opening a window on what looks like the room where the disciples had recently celebrated the Passover with Jesus. But now, after his death, they had locked the doors and gathered together in fear. 

Without warning, Jesus stood among them and bade them shalom. Showing them the marks of his wounds, he again bade them peace. Then, summarizing what he had said during their last supper and mirroring God's gift of life to the first humans (Genesis 2:7), Jesus breathed his Spirit into them and commissioned them to carry on his own vocation.

Luke tells a version of this same story in Acts, describing how the disciples had encountered Jesus over a period of 40 days. Then, after spending 10 days waiting and praying together, the Spirit of God shook them out of all inertia, impelling them to assume their apostleship. 

Thus began an incredible, centurieslong adventure of broadening horizons. Starting with the disciples' amazing experience of being able to tell the Jesus story to Jews "from every nation under heaven," this adventure would continue for centuries, sending disciples to all the peoples and cultures of the world. 

Although impelled by the Spirit, this evangelical adventure was never easy. At each new step of the way, Christians needed to broaden their outlook, question their dogmatic assumptions, and ask the Spirit for guidance. 

That's the process Paul describes in his first letter to the Corinthians, where he speaks of rejoicing in the Spirit's diverse gifts. Paul teaches that every gift of an individual, a people or a culture manifests the Spirit bestowed for the benefit of the entire body. 

Following Paul's lead, Karl Rahner, the great 20th-century theologian, commented that after the events of Jesus' life and after the Pentecost came to fruition in the "Council of Jerusalem" (Acts 15:1-31), the next major step for the Christian community did not come until the Second Vatican Council in 1962-65 opened the church to the modern world and all her cultures.

What does Pentecost mean today? In the 21st century, when no part of the world is unreachable and every language is translatable in an instant, Francis tells us in Fratelli Tutti that it is time to appreciate the unavoidable "and blessed awareness that we are all part of one another" and can "no longer think in terms of 'them' and 'those,' but only 'us.' "

As we celebrate God's Spirit present throughout creation, let us abandon our locked-up mentalities and venture into mind and soul-stretching interchanges with the wild and wonderful variety of the Spirit's manifestations in our world. Pentecost is ongoing!

In the opening lines of the Acts of the Apostles, the second volume of his Gospel, Luke describes the disciples' 50-day period of learning the meaning of the Resurrection. For 40 of those days, the risen Jesus made himself known to them, revealing that he had passed through death and teaching them again what he had always taught: "The reign of God is among you" (Luke 17:21).

Luke is the only evangelist to describe Jesus' ascension, and he ties the two volumes of his Gospel together by describing it at the end of the first and the beginning of the second (Luke 24:50-51; Acts 1:9). In Luke's presentation, just before ascending to the Father, Jesus sent the disciples into a retreat, a 10-day time of reconstituting themselves in preparation for the experience of Pentecost (Acts 1:11-26).

Matthew, taking a very different and subtle approach to Jesus' departure, starts this story when the myrrh-bearing women met an angel who sent them to announce that Jesus was risen and would meet his disciples in Galilee. As they obeyed those instructions, the risen Lord appeared to them, and he, too, commissioned them to announce the news and send the disciples back to where they had started. 

Matthew says nothing about what happened as the disciples retraced their steps for the 60 miles separating Jerusalem from Galilee. What did they do and say to one another along the way? What happened as they returned to where they had first fallen in love with Jesus? 

What a hard homecoming it must have been! What could they say to their friends and relatives? They had journeyed so far following a master who inspired them to leave everything behind. Now, when the news of Jesus' execution had surely arrived before they got there, how did they face those back home whose words or gazes asked, "What now?" 

Matthew, exquisitely in tune with the symbolism of the Hebrew Scriptures, simply tells us that they went to Galilee, going like their ancestors to a mountain of encounter with God. (Remember, among others, the mountains where Noah's ark landed, where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, where Moses encountered the burning bush, where God gave the 10 commandments and where Jesus sat as he spoke the Sermon on the Mount.) 

There, like those who had gone before them, the disciples found themselves on that threshold of faith where amazement left them both worshiping and doubting. 

Matthew tells us so little, yet enough. There on the mountain, when the disciples saw Jesus, they truly came home. In doubt and confusion, joy and wonder, they encountered the one who knew and loved them like no other. And Jesus, knowing that mission offered them the only path to comprehending his mystery, sent them to take his message to the ends of the earth.

Jesus, who had come to understand his mission by putting it into practice, knew that no theory, no law, no dogma, no commandment can elicit genuine faith. The only path to deep belief is to step out and walk on the water of faith in the one who sends you into mission.

Inviting them to this living faith, the risen Lord told the disciples that his message of unfailing love was the only genuine power in the world. As they practiced and preached that, bringing others into communion with God, they would recognize his presence among them until the end of ages. 

The letter to the Ephesians gives us another iteration of this message. The author makes an astounding claim in these few words: "God has put all things beneath [Christ's] feet and gave him as head … to the church which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way" (emphasis added). 

This explains what Jesus, the promised Emmanuel/God-with-us of Matthew 1:23, meant when he promised, "I am with you until the end of the age." Christ remains present in and through his disciples. 

As we hear in Acts, faith is an experience of knowing the presence of God and waiting/yearning for more. The narratives of the women at the tomb, of the disciples waiting in Jerusalem, and of those who returned to Galilee, all reveal Christ present in the community that strives to grow in faith. Ephesians tells us that faith in Jesus is not a belief about him, but a belief in and through the community that is his body. 

As we celebrate the feast of the Ascension of the Lord, the Scriptures teach us that genuine faith is a way of life in community. The feast of the Ascension reminds us that our vocation is to continue being and seeking God with us, "until the end of the age."